Six years after their last release, Boston’s Buffalo Tom turn back to the same sound that made them one of the most underrated college rock bands of the 1990s with Jump Rope, their tenth album. The music here will be familiar to anyone who grew up with “Sodajerk” or “Birdbrain.”
In fact, you’d be forgiven for assuming the album opening track, the jangly “Helmet” came out years ago. As frontman Bill Janovitz said recently, “As with most things in Buffalo Tom, we have a chemistry and a natural sound that emerges no matter how we try to manipulate it. ‘Helmet’ is a prime example of this phenomenon, a song that could be at home on any of our previous records, but I associate it mostly with the layered crisp sounds of Big Red Letter Day.”
The band – still comprised of all three founding members – singer/guitarist Janovitz, bassist Chris Colbourn, and drummer Tom Maginnis – approach this record with the same relaxed, effortless vibe that made the trio such a consistently great act throughout the 1990s. The harmonies on “New Girl Singing” and the effortlessly cool vocals on “Recipes” and “Come Closer” sound like a band that have spent decades working together and anticipating where the song goes next.
Coming out of the same Amherst/Boston music scene that spawned a brilliantly diverse collective of bands like the Blake Babies/Juliana Hatfield, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr, the Pixies, The Lemonheads and Morphine, Buffalo Tom had (and still has) a sound that despite owing a genealogy to both pop and punk and even folk and roots at times, is still best described by the catchall Gen X term Alternative Rock. You can hear that in songs like the hard to define “Come Closer” and “Little Ghostmaker.” There is not a lot new about the music here, but there doesn’t need to be.
The band celebrates the album’s release with a frustratingly short stint of shows across the U.S. that start Friday locally in Amherst before heading over to play some dates in Europe.
